The Tornado God

I remember being carried out of my grandmother’s house in the middle of the night to take refuge in the storm cellar. I was wrapped in a quilt and draped over my father’s shoulder. My father and other family members hurried across the yard toward the cellar door. In the lightning flashes I could see the chinaberry trees bent nearly double in the wind. I could feel the berries and the hail hitting me through the quilt.

And that sound. Like a train bearing down, booming and constant. That sound filled a recurring dream I had well into my 20’s. To this day, I can still hear that sound. I hear it as I watch the footage of the tornado devastation in Joplin, and I heard it watching the devastation in Alabama and elsewhere just a few weeks ago.

The “tornado experience” is why my theological studies – meandering and eclectic as they’ve been for nearly 30 years now – always return to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. In this stunningly beautiful and heartbreaking work, the God of the Abrahamic tradition appears as a whirlwind to “answer” – if you can call it that – Job’s questions and accusations about his suffering. The force of God’s answer to Job is unequivocal, befitting a tornado, and puts Job in his place. Despite nearly 40 chapters of righteous indignation at God’s unfairness, Job abruptly silences himself and repents, saying “I am but dust. I spoke about things I don’t understand.”

Job’s friends in the story provide their answers to the classic question: why do bad things happen to good people? Their answers are simplistic and conventional. God rewards the righteous and punishes the sinful, so God is punishing you for sin. God is teaching you a lesson. God is disciplining you.

Job steadfastly refutes all these explanations, and rightly so. Ultimately, they don’t hold water. They didn’t with him, and they don’t with us now. Job highlights the hard data of the world that’s always been a refutation of the all-too-easy, comforting notion that “God rewards the good and punishes the wicked.”

Look around. The good get mowed down by natural and human violence as much as anyone. And the wicked often live long and healthy lives, surrounded by their laughing grandchildren. It was true in Job’s time. It’s true now.

God the Tornado answers Job in equal parts National Geographic and Animal Planet. As the supreme creative force of nature, God has established all things – the solar system, the earth, the seas, the mountains, all the animals, humans, the entire limitless cosmos – to run according to plans and schemes that God has ordained. They run without fail, gloriously, mysteriously, beautifully and, yes, sometimes tragically. The infinite whole is ungraspable by our finite minds, and refuses to be “tamed” by our simplistic moralizing about the good and the wicked “deserving” what they get from Nature.

The Tornado God reminds us that all our theological formulations are just that – human attempts to codify and nail down that which is infinite and irreducible to our finitude. The Tornado God reduces all those formulations to dust, along with the houses and shops in Joplin.

And we who remain are left to pick up the pieces and carry on, perhaps knowing as Job came to know, that we too are but dust.